Gerard VanderLeun wants to blend in just so the New Black Panthers won't put a bounty on his head and Spike Lee won't tweet his home address.

But how best to do that? At first I tried skin-tinting, or as my dermatologist likes to say, "reverse Jacksoning." Alas I quickly discovered, as millions of my fellow Americans of the African persuasion have discovered, that it just isn't that easy to change my hue. The other night I steeped in a bathtub I'd filled with hot water and 496 Black Teabags. I was hoping for some sort of mahogany tint by midnight but all I got was a transdermal caffine rush.

Yesterday morning I briefly applied a gallon of walnut body paint but one glance in the mirror and I recalled that running around in blackface, or even walnutface, was frowned on from every official African American from Lewis Farrakhan to Rachael Maddow and that albino president Bill Clinton. Hence body paint was right out. Following that I considered a full body tattoo using India Ink but the process of covering half of one cuticle was so painful I backed out of that one too.

So maybe the next best thing is wearing a hoodie but:

Of course, dressing in a hoodie in support of my African-American non-hood hoodie wearing fellow citizens was hard for me since I was, I am deeply ashamed to say, born white. Not just white but worse, WASP. As such I can't just boogie down with my bad self to the half-block ghetto of Seattle and grab me a genuine hoodie. As a WASP I not only don't know where the Hood Hoodie Store is, I am not allowed to know.

Former Black Panther Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) made quite a fuss when he donned a "hoodie" during a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives until he was escorted out. At the time, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "applauded his courage" for doing so.

Meanwhile, back home in Rush's district, two men wearing hooded sweatshirts, or "hoodies," were the shooters in an incident that left one dead and five injured.

In fact, during a span of six-hours Thursday night, 13 people were shot, leaving two dead in Chicago. It would seem it takes more courage to simply walk down the street in Rush's district than it does to wear a hooded sweatshirt in the House of Representatives by way of a stunt in a bizarre tribute to a young man shot and killed in Florida during a shooting incident still under investigation.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Glenn Reynolds calls Obama a "racist hatemonger"

He promised hope but he delivers hate.

Glenn Reynolds has been a rather mild mannered law professor with a wildly popular blog. He was never a big fan of Obama but I think the rank race baiting of the Treyvon Martin case has pushed him over the edge.

JOHN HINDERAKER:“President Obama has fanned the flames of hatred in the Trayvon Martin case, and has not said a single critical word about the outrageous actions of the New Black Panthers, who offered a $10,000 bounty on George Zimmerman–the same New Black Panthers on whose behalf Eric Holder quashed a federal criminal prosecution; or of Spike Lee, who tweeted a wrong address for Zimmerman, presumably to facilitate harassment or even murder; or of the many liberals who have posted on the @killzimmerman Twitter feed; or of the many other Democrats and liberals who have indulged in an orgy of hate with respect to Mr. Zimmerman. President Obama’s interest in the victims of violence is selective: he cares if they look like the hypothetical son he doesn’t have.”

In other words, he’s a racist hatemonger. Just to be clear. So much for hope and change.

The race card has been overextended for a while. You can still get credit for it in the NY Times, the alphabet networks and NPR, but in the rest of the country you will get pushback, hard. The Obama re-election team is misjudging the race issue and misplaying the race card, badly.

If someone knew that John Wayne Gacy would soon go on a killing spree and said “I hope he fails” would you call him uncivil? If you are Virginian Pilot editorial writer Candy Hatcher you hope he succeeds. That’s the thrust of her column on civility. She accused Rush Limbaugh of being uncivil when he said of President Obama “I hope he fails.”

The sentiment could not be more plain; something Limbaugh has explained many times. Limbaugh hoped that Obama would not succeed in transforming America into a European-style socialist model because he wanted what was best of Americans, not what was best for Barack Obama.

This editorial is the sort of sissified drivel that people like Candy Hatcher write. "Look at that poor John Wayne Gacy, I hope he gets to live the dream." He did, for a while. He’s famous, his 33 victims are anonymous.

As the legal future of Obamacare is debated at the Supreme Court, well over half the people in the country hope this monstrosity is struck down as unconstitutional. It’s the signature legislative achievement of the Obama administration. Every Republican running for office pledges to abolish it to the cheers of crowds. Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's senate seat because he promised to vote against it! Most people wish the best for the country. When the choice is the best for the country or the best for Obama, Hatcher sides with Obama.

What are the other signature achievements of the Obama administration?

Skyrocketing national debt.

Record gas prices and Obama says the answer is algae.

A promise the make electricity bills skyrocket by restricting power plants via EPA fiat.

Millions of unemployed three years into the most anemic “recovery” in history.

Housing prices continue to decline.

The politics of racial hate and division.

The politics of class warfare.

Trillions poured into “Green Energy” failures.

Crony capitalism rewarding campaign contributors.

Hundreds of thousands more Federal employees to manage our lives and tell us what to do.

Make no mistake; these are all part of the Obama agenda in one form or another. Obama is succeeding in changing America. Is this the change you were looking for? Candy Hatcher thinks that hoping that Obama had not been so successful in implementing these changes is uncivil.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Second Trayvon Martin Twitter feed identified

Where does Spike Lee live?

At Reason.com i was reading More on the Irrelevance of 'Stand Your Ground' to the Trayvon Martin Case when a commenter asked:

Anyone have Spike Lee's address?

Here's the response:

Loki|3.28.12 @ 2:08PM|# Most likely:

153 E 63rd St, Apt 55 New York, NY 10065-7405* *Based on the fact that he lives in Manhattan, and according to wikipedia his real full name is Shelton Jackson Lee, and his wife's name is Tonya. According to whitepages.com this is the address of a Shelton J. Lee who is assiciated with a Tonya L. Lee. I do not condone nor am I suggesting that anyone use this information to harrass the people who live there. It could just be a coincidence that someone with a similar name lives there. Also, it's kind of scary what you can find out in 5 minutes on google.

Zimmerman is latino and a Democrat His oppositon are black Democrats and white Democrats.Anyway you look at it, it's a Democrat Race war....yet again. Like all of the Democrats special interest groups , they can only stay Democrat if they ignore those other Democrats that oppose themGays can't think of the Islamics, blacks, asians or latinos that oppose them. Latinos can't acknowledge gays, blacks or atheistsAtheists look the other way on Islamics , christian blacks and catholic latinosOn and on,....the Democrat party is a self- implosion waiting to happen

If George Zimmerman is a White Hispanic is Barack Obama a Black White or a White Black

Led by the New York Times, a new version of white person has been created, the White Hispanic. As certainly as day follows night, if a Liberal member of the media refers to Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, he is identified as a white Hispanic. It turns out that his father was white, his mother Peruvian. He identifies himself as Hispanic, and – for those who care - is registered as a Democrat. Has there been a change in the NY Times style book so that people of mixed heritage are now described in terms like this?

Barack Obama is the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father. For some reason, the Liberal media identifies him as Black. So why is Zimmerman’s racial identity modified with the term “white” while Obama’s is not. Could it be that the Left is inherently racist?

The national media doesn’t do stories on black-on-black crime. . . . They don’t do stories on black-on-white crime. . . . The New York Times, in almost a caricature of a liberal media, refers to George Zimmerman as a ‘white Hispanic.’ I guarantee you that if George Zimmerman did something good — if he finished first in his high school graduating class when he was younger — they wouldn’t refer to him as a white Hispanic, he’d just be a Hispanic. . . . He’s only a ‘white Hispanic’ because they need the word ‘white’ to further the story line, which is, White, probably racist vigilante shoots an unarmed black kid.

"White Hispanic.” That’s how the New York Times, Reuters, and other media outlets have opted to describe George Zimmerman, a man who would simply be Hispanic if he hadn’t shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The term, rarely if ever used before this tragedy, is necessary in telling the Martin story in a more comfortable way.

What’s the comfortable way? It’s the way the blame for Martin’s death belongs squarely at the feet of “the system.” And “the system” is a white thing, don’t you know?

When will the Zimmerman standard be applied to Barack Hussein Obama?

NY Times flak catcher Phil Corbett denies, denies, denies:

“To suggest that our coverage of this story or our description of Mr. Zimmerman is intended to serve an agenda or push a political view is simply ridiculous. It’s just false,”

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

DETROIT — A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government’s case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members’ expressed hatred of law enforcement didn’t amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of anti-government audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.

“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.

Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the U.S. and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.

“The judge had a lot of guts,” defense attorney William Swor said. “It would have been very easy to say, ‘The heck with it,’ and hand it off to the jury. But the fact is she looked at the evidence, and she looked at it very carefully.”

Is anybody else out there as sick and tired as I am of lynch mob racists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (vide: Tawana Brawley, the Duke Lacrosse kids) who don the mantel of the “civil rights” movement to indict non-blacks in advance of the facts, and incite racial rage against them? Yet that is exactly what they – and scores of black leaders — are doing to an Hispanic individual named George Zimmerman. Along with a cast of thousands, they are holding him guilty of racism before the fact, justifying a hatred, as inflammatory as the hatred once spewed by southern crackers against blacks.

There is no evidence whatsoever that race was a defining factor in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. Notwithstanding the absence of evidence, this unhappy incident is now the occasion for school shut-downs, mass marches and public death threats by enraged African Americans, displaying behaviors reminiscent of the lynch mobs that were once a scourge of their parents’ generation in a now rejected past.

And Obama joined the mob.

Not willing to be separated from his racial constituency, even when they are behaving badly, Obama has lent his prestige to the insinuation that the crime was inspired by the victim’s race. Otherwise there would be no reason to mention the fact that “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Everyone who has a son should be concerned by the loss of this life. By making it racial, the president is establishing guilt without evidence, and indicting non-black America as well.

The display of racial outrage over this case is a national disgrace. It is a throwback to the past and a shameful repudiation of the values the civil rights movement once stood for but apparently does no longer.

Obama is reflexively siding with his black constituency, as he did in the case of Henry Louis Gates. It’s a reminder that he was and remains a community organizer and has not really adopted the role of President of all the people.

Want a sample of unfiltered racial hatred? Check out the tweets at #Travon.

A very ugly truth is being revealed. The black community has at its core a burning hatred of the white community and that core is using this tragedy as an opportunity to show its naked face. As a result the suspicion will grow on the part of many whites that their black friends, acquaintances, the people they see in the street and in the store, hate them underneath a façade of civility. How do you view people who you believe may hate you? To say this is not helpful may be the understatement of the year.

Here is a picture of wealthy film maker Spike Lee, doing the Dumbass Thing. His Twitter address is @spikelee where you will find all the hatred poured out. It turns your stomach. it's like watching a really gruesome accident, but it's deliberate, an incitement to violence, race hatred in the raw.

Best reason not to re-elect Obama

And it's not just negociating missile defense give-aways with the Russians. It's about nationalizing more industries, more crony capitalism, much higher gas prices, much higher taxes, much higher debt, fomenting a race war and much, much worse.

Once "The Won" doesn't have to worry about another election, the mask comes off and pure Obama comes out: the corrupt Chicago poll who embodies "Critical Race Theory," Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers is unleased. You thought you saw the real Barack Hussein Obama? Wait till after November. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times the whole of the planet heated up.

It then cooled down naturally and there was even a 'mini ice age'.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.

This is one of the huge holes in the man-made-global-warming theory. You can prove just about anything if you can choose the beginning and end points of your data series. And that's pretty much what the Global Warmists did.

“Talk about absence of spine, your guys haven’t introduced a budget at all on anything, haven’t done anything on Medicare, on Social Security or anything on tax reform. Zero. That is the definition of an absence of spine.”

DOES THIS MEAN THE PRESS ACTED STUPIDLY? Black friend defends shooter of Florida teen.“George Zimmerman is not a racist and cried for days after shooting dead a black Florida teenager, a black, longtime friend of Zimmerman said on Sunday in a sympathetic portrayal of a man maligned by critics as a trigger-happy bigot. Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic, shot Trayvon Martin, 17, in what he said was self defense during an altercation in the gated community Zimmerman was watching on February 26 in Sanford, Florida. After attracting little notice initially, the case gained widespread attention, sparking protests and renewing a national debate about race.”

Actually, it’s a national debate about press irresponsibility and political dishonesty. And the more information that comes out, the less there seems to be to debate.

.

UPDATE: Blog comment of the day: “Remember Obama saying about Major Hasan [how] we shouldn’t jump to judgement?”

MORE: Reader John Oglesby writes: “Zimmerman is a ‘White Hispanic’? t seems they’ll use whatever fits their narrative. If a Caucasian man had shot a hooded Zimmerman, there’s no way they’d be calling him a White Hispanic.” No, then he’d be a Latino, full-stop.

I thought at the beginning of this press-created frenzy that if Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are on the case, the odds are that white guy is innocent. Now it turns out the "white" guy is only white if you allow the media to re-define racial idendity.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Friday, March 23, 2012

I think everyone should send those foundations a polite email or a phone call to ensure they are aware that they are funding an organziation whose purpose in life is to use strongarm thug tactics to silence and censor speech. Do they really want to be associated with an organization that enbraces tyrannical, totalitarian values?

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Today in ‘jokes about black First Ladies’ news…

Education on the Chopping Block

I’m not a school teacher and it’s been many years since I’ve been a student, but one thing that I know about education since I went to school is that the current school system sucks. My kids are smart, but the things that they have learned that will stand them through life they learned outside of school.

That’s why home schooling has taken off like a hot Internet stock. Home schooling is the confluence of a number of currents including – but not limited to the decline of the public school system.

Home schooling was once the province of religious parent who wanted their children to avoid the secularization of their children. But something interesting happened. Parents became more educated, schools deteriorated and fewer moms worked. Let’s take the last first. It may seem strange that high levels of female unemployment would lead to more home schooling. But keep in mind that many two earner households are that by choice. And when the mom loses her job, knowing the quality of schools her children are attending, the question arises if she should look for another job or stay home to take care of her kids. And if she’s taking care of the kids, can she do a better job than the pubic school?

A hundred years ago when the average adult did not have a high school education, the local schoolmarm - with barely more than that - was considered the fount of educational knowledge. Besides, the women worked the fields or the farm. Today, the average mom has the educational level of the average school teacher. Schools have become politicized to the extent that many people feel that they are run for the benefit of the teachers and administrators rather than the students. Graduates are not able to read their diplomas and more people than ever believe that public education is geared toward brainwashing their children against the values that their parent hold.

Don't give me the academic credentials of the parents business. Every public school teacher has a baccalaureate or better. The academic achievement of public schoolchildren's parents that don't teach their children doesn't matter. I will laugh you out of here with "socialization" horsehockey. Not knowing from whom to buy diverted prescription drugs in third period and which "special needs" teacher puts out is not useful information, and does not make for a potent lifetime social lubricant.

Like a lot of things in life, things change. Academia had better learn that it’s on the Chopping Block.

Questions I want to ask George Stephanopoulos

The president stages a photo-op in Oklahoma to take credit for the portion of the Keystone XL pipeline that doesn't need his approval and for oil production on private and state lands beyond his jurisdiction.

If one of his aides some morning remarked on a particularly lovely sunrise, it wouldn't surprise us if President Obama responded with a "thank you," so gifted is he in taking credit for successes that he has nothing to do with and that occur despite, not because, of his policies.

Professor Jacobson tracks the coordinated efforts to get Rush off the air.

I have been covering political boycotts frequently since the inception of this blog, including the Prop 8 boycotts, the Mormon Boycott, the DNC boycott, the Beck boycott, the King & Spalding boycott, boycotts of various states for various reasons, the anti-Israel boycotts, and so on.

So when the boycott of Rush Limbaugh started as a result of his comments about Sandra Fluke, I took an interest.

There has been a lot of coverage regarding my post, Media Matters astroturfed the Limbaugh secondary boycott. The post was based in substantial part on interviews given by Angelo Carusone, Director of Online Strategy for Media Matters, who was not bashful in claiming credit for Limbaugh’s loss of advertisers, particularly in the early days of the boycott.

The post was linked by Instapundit and others and had gained a lot of attention by the time Limbaugh used it for his first tweet.

In response to the Limbaugh tweet, a non-Media Matters group called Boycott Rush, organized by former congressional candidate Krystal Ball and someone who tweets under the name @shoq, asserted that it started its efforts before and independent of Media Matters. Among other things, I was falsely accused of working for and being paid by Limbaugh to tarnish the anti-Rush movement by tying it to Media Matters. A comment also was made about my “professional future” (these tweets are from March 18):

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Things that must not be said.

It’s important not to scare the timorous.

Many on the Right wish that some of the more outspoken members in their side would just shut up. The recent near-universal condemnation of Rush Limbaugh is proof that even the mildest transgressions must be condemned. A piece by Matt K. Lewis is a perfect example. When the Left is using four-letter words as if they were government subsidized (like Solyndra), he writes an entire column wishing that Ann Coulter would pipe down. Who is Matt Lewis? Beats me. But he was given a column by the Daily Caller, so he may be someone’s room-mate. Looking at one or two of his other columns, it seems as if he’s someone whose focus is on stoking internecine warfare on the Right.

The desire on the Right to stifle inquiry is mild compared to the desire on the Left to make certain ideas out of bounds for serious inquiry. Until the murderer of seven Frenchmen and children turned out to be a self-confessed flower of al Qaida, the Lame Stream Media in Europe and the US were ready to brand the Right as guilty. The AP just knew who the culprits were:

“Focus fell Tuesday on three paratroopers who had been expelled from their regiment near Toulouse in 2008 for neo-Nazi sympathies, a police official said. The killer on Monday handled large-caliber guns with expertise, leading some to suspect he had a military or police background.”

How unfortunate for them that the culprit is named Mohammad. Now, instead of beginning a genuine search for the next Muslim youth who will follow in this murderer’s footsteps, the LSM will begin asking why French culture turned a perfectly nice young man into a mass murderer. I’m absolutely sure that the NPR analysis of this killing spree will follow exactly that trajectory. You can see the outlines in this article which shifts the blame to Israel. They have already run one story suggesting that the killer was a neo-Nazi.

The Nazis are the Left's favorite villains, perhaps due to that fact that they are no threat.

Europe can face Nazism with great moral confidence and contempt. After all the US Army already beat them in 1945. They are as safe fighting Nazis as shooting paper targets on the range. The Mohammed Merah’s shoot back. At the heart of the European evasion is a deep awareness of incapacity. They won’t face the obvious challenges because they fear they can’t — at least not without reforming themselves.

Deep thinkers in the moderate middle are beginning to believe that the Blue model is now shown to be hopelessly broken, a synthesis will arise where both the Left and the Right will begin to work on real solutions. Like a second marriage, that may well be the triumph of hope over experience. How many Marxist professors were persuaded that Communism doesn’t work by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the horror stories that were finally told about the abject failure of that system? The Left’s hold on academia is stronger today than ever.

While there are faint signs that this may be possible, and while this is the preferred solution, it must be said that history is not compelling. Prior to World War 2, Winston Churchill was an outcast for uttering what most of the political class though were outrageous remarks regarding Germany and its leaders. Had he given his “blood sweat and tears” speech before the war he would have been locked up and the keys thrown away. Only the outbreak of real war made Churchill's words sound true and his political resurrection possible.

Mark Steyn has a great column (aren’t they all?) about Santorum and his beliefs.

Let's take it as read that Rick Santorum is weird. After all, he believes in the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family, the traditional socio-religious understanding of a transcendent purpose to human existence. Once upon a time, back in the mists of, ooh, the mid–20th century, all these things were, if not entirely universal, sufficiently mainstream as to be barely worthy of discussion. Now they're not. Isn't the fact that conventional morality is now "weird" itself deeply weird? The instant weirdification of ideas taken for granted for millennia is surely mega-weird — unless you think that our generation is possessed of wisdom unique to human history. In which case, why are we broke?

Look, I get the problem with a Santorum candidacy. And I get why he seems weird to Swedes and Aussies, and even Americans. If you're surfing a news bulletin en route from Glee to Modern Family, Santorum must seem off-the-charts weird, like a monochrome episode that's been implausibly colorized from a show too old even for TV Land reruns. It would be healthier to thrash these questions out in the culture, in the movies and novels and pop songs. But Hollywood has taken sides, and the Right has mostly retreated from the field. And somebody has to talk about these things somewhere or other. Our fiscal crisis is not some unfortunate bookkeeping accident that a bit of recalibration by a savvy technocrat can fix. In the United States as in Greece, it is a reflection of the character of a people. The problem isn't that Rick Santorum's weird, but that a government of record-breaking brokeness already busting through its newest debt-ceiling increase even as it announces bazillions in new spending is entirely normal.

The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is responsible for insuring that the Party is never wrong. It rewrites history and changes facts to fit the narrative that the Party never makes mistakes. If Big Brother predicts something that does not come to pass, Minitrue rewrites history to make sure that the prediction is accurate. Its purpose is to make sure that the Party is always right and its rule is absolute. Resistance is futile to a Party that’s always right.

That is what is so unsettling about the disappearance of stories about the Obama girls and their vacation in Mexico. The Obamas have become sensitive to the appearance that they are spending the taxpayer’s money on lavish vacations, so they decided to see how good their hold on the media is. As each story about the Mexican trip and the 25 bodyguards disappeared down the “Memory Hole” they were confirmed in their belief that the so-called fearless and independent press would erase what the Party Obamas wanted erased. We already knew that the press is eagerly rewriting his predictions about what he would do during his term in office, now they are editing the narrative for him in real time and congratulating themselves on their compliance.

The ostensible reason for scrubbing the news is that Mexico is a dangerous place and publicizing the trip for the girls places them in greater jeopardy. If so, why send them there in the first place? Claudia Rosett makes and excellent point when we take our eye off the safety of the Obama girls and focus for a moment on those 25 secret service guards who are supposed to take a bullet for the girls if there is an attack.

But that brings us to the risks faced by those traveling secret service agents — whether 25 in number, or whatever the precise total might be. Yes, their job is to protect the First Family, and that includes taking a bullet or laying down their lives, if need be, to ensure that not a hair on a First Head is harmed. We can expect to hear no complaints from the Secret Service. But those Secret Service agents quite likely have families, too. They have now been dispatched to do their job not within U.S. shores where American authorities have enormous powers to minimize the risks, nor in a place which the State Department at least regards as routinely secure for Americans to amuse themselves on spring breaks.

Instead, these Secret Service agents have been sent to provide security in Mexico, where the State Department warns that due to transnational criminal organizations, “crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country” including “homicide, gun battles, kidnapping, carjacking and highway robbery.” State reports that “gun battles have occurred in broad daylight on streets and in other public venues, such as restaurants and clubs.” Of particular concern are “kidnappings and disappearances throughout Mexico,” with local police in some cases implicated. State adds that U.S. government personnel and their families “are prohibited from travel” to some of the most dangerous areas. And though the holiday destination reported in the vanishing new stories is not on the list of Mexican provinces totally taboo for personal travel of government personnel, State warns that in Mexico, “even if no advisories are in effect for a given state, crime and violence can occur anywhere.”

Perhaps one way the White House is entitled to regard the Secret Service is that there should be no constraints on the risks its agents are asked to run, for whatever reason. Certainly if the president wants to visit Afghanistan (which he’s done twice, on highly secured “surprise” visits, during his presidency), or go to Mexico on official business, it’s appropriate that Secret Service agents are expected to go with him, and do their jobs, at higher risk, to protect him and any family members in tow. But — hoping that all goes safely and smoothly with this Mexican spring break, and trusting to the Secret Service to ensure the safety of members of the First Family, wherever they might go — may we ask, nonetheless, a question:

In the terrible event that State’s warning proves relevant, and in the course of doing whatever it takes to provide security, any of those 25 or so American Secret Service agents are wounded or even killed in the line of fire, would the White House still consider the context a non-story? Would it be irrelevant that they had been asked to run such risks not to safeguard official business, but to enable a personal holiday trip to a place under a U.S. government travel warning? One need not quarrel over whether the White House, or anyone in it, is entitled to organize holiday trips to just about anywhere on the planet. But being entitled to do something does not necessarily mean it’s a good idea to do it. Where’s the sense of responsibility to those who serve? Where’s the judgment?

A reasonable person who suggest that the Obamas don’t really regard the danger to their guards to be any concern. When it comes to risking the lives of the agents versus the girls desire to vacation in Mexico, the agent’s lives don’t weigh very heavily in the balance. Certainly not enough to change the minds of the First Teen Agers and their friends.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Jon McNaughton, a controversial artist who often mixes religion and politics in his work, has released a new painting.

In ‘One Nation Under Socialism’ President Obama holds the U.S. Constitution as it burns.

While McNaughton previously depicted Obama stepping on the nation’s founding document, ‘One Nation Under Socialism’ glowers directly as if challenging the viewer. His right hand is holding The Constitution and his left hand is pointing to the flames.

Jerry Saltz, an art critic for New York Magazine is not amused:

When asked for an opinion Saltz said that the painting contained “Bad academic derivative realism; typical propaganda art; drop-dead obvious in message; visually dead as a doornail.”

The idea that artists are supposed to be controversial is stopped dead when the controversy does not advance the Liberal cause.

The Plan for America's Future

It's time to vet Obama, in fact, it's past time to vet Obama. Interesting story about Obama and the Ayers family. It may explain how a young Barack managed to get into the "right" schools and be appointed to the "right" boards. It helps to have a wealthy and influential mentor paying your way and pulling the strings. The Ayers family fills the bill.

To see similar hypocritical Leftist misogyny, we need only go back to the last time a Democrat was in the White House. Whenever a woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct by Bill Clinton, the response of the Clinton defenders, both in and out of the media, was to attack her credibility, character, and virtue. Advisor James Carville famously said of Paula Jones (the young Arkansas state employee whom Clinton as governor had his state police guard procure to his hotel room for the purpose of orally pleasuring him), “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.” Evan Thomas of Newsweek dutifully complemented the slander by declaring her on national television “just some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks,” though he later was compelled to apologize in print. (One wonders how residents of trailer parks felt about that, but I guess empathy for them is for the little people.) When Kathleen Willey accused the president of groping her in the White House, and was physically threatened for her trouble, feminist icon and (former) scourge of sexual harassers Gloria Steinem said that it was no problem — he was entitled to a freebie, after which Cathy Young of Reason magazine reported on “the death of sexual harassment.”

It got worse. As the Paula Jones lawsuit progressed, and the president committed acts of obstruction of justice (federal felonies) by perjury and subornation of perjury through threats and bribes, the White House was prepared to go after Monica Lewinsky, the woman about whom he engaged in such obstruction. She was bribed with jobs, and urged to in turn suborn perjury from her confidante Linda Tripp, by implying threats against her family. If the incriminating blue dress hadn’t turned up, their plan was to continue to cover up and lie, and accuse Lewinsky of being a crazy stalker. The White House orchestrated the leak of the personnel files of Pentagon employee Linda Tripp, the only person in the entire fiasco who told the truth, in an attempt (sadly quite successful) to discredit her. This included a mistaken felony arrest record that had been sealed since she was a teenager. She was vilified and maligned in the media, with late-night comedians mocking her physical appearance. It’s unlikely that many of these people were either conservatives or Republicans.

Again, no one familiar with the history of the Left should be surprised by any of this (other than perhaps the blatant hypocrisy, aided and abetted by the ever-compliant press). Misogyny and male chauvinism run deep in the roots of the modern Left. Many think that the gender feminist movement of the seventies, started by Gloria Steinem and others, was a reaction against the conventional culture of the fifties and early sixties, with its casual assertions of male superiority and paternalism (on literally dramatic display in the AMC television series Mad Men, which also shows how the attitudes evolved through the decade). But it was at least as much, if not more, a reaction against the male chauvinist pigs of the so-called New Left on campus in the mid-to-late sixties, in which the men would write up the manifestos and plan the demonstrations, expecting nothing more of the women than to satisfy their appetites by cooking for and copulating with them. Basically, it was barefoot (or naked) in the kitchen, hopefully without the pregnancy, but for which abortions were required in the event of accidents.

Let me point out right now that if I hear that phrase once more I’m going to lose it. No, forget that. I’m going lose it right NOW.

Let me tell you what war is, okay?

War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.

War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.

War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.

In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.

If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.

And please don’t come back and say women have to carry babies and this is unfair. Or that men are stronger and this is unfair. Or that… This is NOT kindergarten. LIFE is unfair. NATURE is unfair. Civilization and society can only go so far to compensate for the basic inequality of nature. It is not the job of nature or government to turn us all into neuters with the exact same aptitudes and abilities. And I, for one, am glad. If you’re not, consider your relationship with your own gender. I suggest your war is mostly internal.

If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world. You are also unleashing a monster. Get the government to force this and NOTHING is out of bonds. Forget selling you the rope to hang you with. The government will eventually force you to pay them to hang you.

I’d like to believe the comment is wrong which I read on some blog defining feminists as a potemkin village of bicycled fish. But judging by how American women seem to be so completely embarrassed by their vaginas that they demand all sorts of compensation and affirmation of their specialness, I’m very afraid the comment was right. These women have things like Vagina Monologues (Imagine, Penis Monologues could ONLY be a middle school play, but because it’s the FEMALE body part we’re supposed to be in awe of it. WHY?) and go on about how they’re powerful, but melt in a pile of hysteria because someone was less than respectful to them.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Man helps woman start car.

He's a hunter, carries a rifle, wears an NRA cap, drinks beer and has a pornographic magazine. He spends two hours of his time to fix her car and she drives off. She's a tenured professor and believes that if she did not have three female friends along she whould have been raped. Because of the way he looked.

From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to have for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps like a modern-day Squanto, I can help the lefties understand my tribe. I was born to the lower middle class and spent a couple of adult years living the life. I score a 63 in Charles Murray’s “bubble quiz,” which puts me into the “first generation middle class with working class parents” ...

The latte tribe insists that working-class peckerwoods are voting against their economic interests when they vote for Republican candidates. This may be true, but it doesn’t mean that voting for the tax-and-condescend party would be a vote for the economic interests of the world’s Archie Bunkers. NAFTA was a Clinton Administration achievement, after all. Why should Archie vote for the Meathead party that shipped his job to Mexico? Economists of all political stripes have also noted that low-income working families tend to pay an appreciable portion of their earnings in taxes. Maybe they get it all back in “services” somehow, but the working poor notice how the non-working poor live off the state without doing any work. They take it personally that working harder is penalized while left-wing policies reward being lazy and dependent. Palefaced plebeians also dislike the latte-tribe concept of “white privilege,” which says the Obama daughters should be given legal preference over poor white kids.

...

Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them. The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?” routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back.

It has too much political momentum and fanatical devotion to go quietly. The environmental establishment is a billion-dollar a year business, and there are plenty of stupid guilty rich people, idiot Hollywood celebrities, and direct-mail dupes to keep the agitation machine going for many years to come. The architecture of environmental law and regulation, and the administrative momentum of the EPA, assures that this zombie movement will continue to do great damage to the economy for a long time to come. But make no mistake—it is a bunch of brain-dead zombies that we face in the environmental movement today.

As for cause of death on the official death certificate, mark it down as “suicide, brought on by hubris.”

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Britain’s Dr George Hibbert was working as a public health care provider. You might think he was working for his patients, but that would not be strictly correct. He was more precisely working for the government, and that is not quite the same thing.

A leading psychiatrist faces extraordinary claims he deliberately misdiagnosed parents with mental disorders – decisions which meant their children were taken away from them …

He was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by social services for the reports which tore children from their parents – many of them young mothers. He is now being investigated over shocking suggestions he distorted the assessments to fit the view of social services.

If true, it is a textbook example of what economists call the principal-agent problem, which is a fancy way of describing a situation when someone (the agent) who is supposed to be working for you (the principal) is really working for someone else.

...

The question is who Dr. Hibbert was really working for. It is an issue of more than academic interest since it turns out there was a demand by government agencies to supply children for adoptions. One way to meet that need was to take away children from unworthy parents. But first they had to be unworthy. And this is where assessments come in.

The allegation is that the doctor could make more money satisfying the agenda of the authorities than serving the needs of his patients. In the language of economists, the agent’s duty to his patients would be “costly to observe” since it would mean a lost “sale” to the government. Lawyers for the patients say, “we believe this distressing case may be the tip of a very big iceberg.”

This is a very big problem with socialized medicine. The patient may think he is the principal, but the doctor is really working for the government who's paying the bill and calling the tune. The relationship between patient and doctor today is one of absolute trust. If my doctor tells me that I have a disease that is incurable I may ask for a second opinion, but I am confident that he’s not deliberately lying to me because I’m the one paying him. When the doctor stops working for me and starts working for the government eventually he’s going to get told by the government that my disease is “incurable” because a “death panel” has determined that the medical budget won’t support my care. And he’s going to tell me that I have a terminal disease, take a pain pill, and go away.

When you take control of the agent what recourse is the principal left with?

The far Left continues to believe American voters are not smart enough to grasp the diversionary tactics it employs to distract us from the issues our President just doesn’t want to talk about – issues that affect us all every day and must be addressed.

Exhibit A in these diversionary tactics is an absurd new attack ad President Obama has released taking my comments out of context. I’m not running for any office, but I’m more than happy to accept the dubious honor of being Barack Obama’s “enemy of the week” if that includes the opportunity to debate him on the issues Americans are actually concerned about. (Remember when I said you don’t need a title to make a difference?)

Just off the top of my head, a few of these concerning issues include:

a debt crisis that has us hurtling towards a Greek-style collapse,

entitlement programs going bankrupt,

a credit downgrade for the first time in our history, a

government takeover of the health care industry that makes care more expensive and puts a rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats between you and your doctor (aka a “death panel”),

$4 and $5 gas at the pump exacerbated by an anti-drilling agenda that rejects good paying energy sector jobs and makes us more dependent on dangerous foreign regimes,

a war in Afghanistan that seems unfocused and unending,

a global presidential apology tour that’s made us look feeble and ridiculous,

crony capitalism run amok in an administration in bed with their favored cronies to the detriment of genuine free market capitalism,

green energy pay-to-play kickbacks to Obama campaign donors, and

a Justice Department still stonewalling on a bungled operation that armed violent Mexican drug lords and led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people.

I’m sure I missed a few things, but the list is just for starters. Along with millions of others, I’m willing and free to discuss these issues with the President anywhere, anytime; and I’m sure any of the four patriots currently running for the GOP nomination would also welcome the opportunity to talk about the problems everyday Americans face due to the abject failure of our current administration’s policies. The President will dismiss all of these problems by saying, “Well, uh, ‘change isn’t easy.’” But considering that candidate Obama promised to turn back the waters and heal the planet, the American people had at least a reasonable expectation that, at the bare minimum, he wouldn’t bankrupt our country.

This latest ad is quite odd, but also quite telling. It shows that our President sure seems fearful of discussing the economy, energy prices, and all the other problems people need addressed. And intended or not, now that his ad opens up the discussion of Barack Obama’s radical past associations and the radical philosophy that shaped his ideas about his promised “fundamental transformation” of our country, I welcome the media to join ordinary Americans in finally vetting Barack Obama. The media failed to do so in 2008 to the detriment of us all. Maybe this time around they can do their job.

They might start by noting the President’s heavily edited attack ad. Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro helps them out in this piece. Please read it all.

AA Passenger Causes Disturbance After Leaving DFW Airport

Flight 2401 left Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport bound for Los Angeles. Passenger Lori Barber said about 15 minutes into the flight a man charged past her, demanding to see the pilot.

Barber told NewsRadio 1080 KRLD the man was hard to miss.

“Well he was wearing two pairs of glasses, one with a red beam coming out of the lens, and he had three or four ‘man purses’ on and he had Superman socks on,” she recalled

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Some people you can just look at and know their position on the environment, politics, global warming, corporations, capitalism, communism, Christianity, racism, sexism, feminism, Limbaugh, Obama, Palin, Maher and much more without even hearing them talk.